


A History of Things Omitted

by tigress



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Family Curses, Gen, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, M/M, Other, Selkies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2018-01-01 16:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1046017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigress/pseuds/tigress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which our characters have something of the supernatural in their background.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Welcomed Season

When she turns five, Mako develops an interest in drawing. It’s not at all unusual, so her parents respond with a gift of crayons and plenty of paper. 

It’s not at all unusual, except she keeps drawing the same thing over and over again. 

‘That’s not what elephants look like,’ her grandmother says once, looking over Mako’s scribblings. For some reason she seems to find the inaccuracy insulting. 

‘They’re not elephants,’ Mako says. ‘Elephants are—‘ she throws her arms open, wide as they’ll go. ‘Elephants are big.’ As far as she’s concerned, that settles the matter. 

Her mother is remarkably beautiful. Her father could not be called remarkable in anything outside his craft. He has a flat face which, against all probability, culminates with a long, hooked nose. His hands are worn and his dark hair streaked with grey. But his eyes are very kind, and her mother looks at him like he’s cloaked in sunlight. 

Even after Tokyo, even battling monsters, even when Sensei is gone, Mako never has a single nightmare. Sadness, yes – of a strange, sweet kind, one that she suspects will stay with her forever. But Mako’s nights are, always have been, quiet and restful.

 

(‘I haven’t slept this well in years,’ Raleigh confesses. He makes a soft, pleased noise when Mako cards her fingers through his hair. 

‘Did you dream?’ She asks. Raleigh is quiet for a few moments, thinking, and then a recollection makes him frown.

‘You know, it’s weird, I... Huh.’

‘What was it?’

Raleigh looks like he expects to be laughed at. ‘Elephants.’)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Japanese folklore, a _baku_ is an auspicious magical creature that eats nightmares. It’s often represented as a chimera with the head of an elephant, but more commonly similar to a Malayan tapir. Hence the not-quite-elephants Mako is drawing.


	2. The Song of the Sea

Raleigh sleeps in the bottom bunk. It’s so he won’t fall out of bed, Mom says. He’s a restless child and has heard people remark that he’s small for his age, so he takes it upon himself to create enough chaos for two. 

Jaz is born in mid-summer, and suddenly the house is not big enough to contain all of them, along with the attention his incessantly wailing little sister is receiving. In mid-summer, Yancy tells Raleigh he’s going to teach him to swim. Raleigh is excited, but then he is disappointed – they go to a swimming pool instead of the beach. We’ll start slow, Yancy says.

He's a good teacher, and if Raleigh were less excited about his own quick progress, he might wonder where his brother learned to swim so well. His movements are graceful, economical, even when he sneaks up on Raleigh and splashes him and then swims away laughing, letting his little brother chase him the length of the entire pool. 

In winter, Raleigh keeps losing his gloves. By the second pair, Mom offers to sew them onto the sleeves of his coat, but he refuses firmly. 

‘I’m not a baby.’

Fine, Mom says. She buys a dozen pairs and stores them in a drawer in the boys’ bedroom. She’s busy with his sister when Raleigh asks for his third pair, and she sends him to get them himself. Bottom drawer, she calls absently down the hall. 

After a great deal of rummaging, Raleigh finds they aren’t there, but something else is, hidden at the bottom under a pile of bed linen. It’s heavier than a blanket, light grey and beautiful, and it feels sleek and soft under his fingers. Like oil made into fabric. 

‘You like it?’ Yancy asks, leaning against the door frame. Raleigh snatches his hand away, as if burned. He hadn’t realized his brother was there. 

‘I don't know,’ he says. He doesn’t know what it is, or why he feels like he’s been caught doing something wrong. 

That night, when Jaz resumes her exhausting crying regimen, Raleigh curls into a tight ball under his duvet and makes a frustrated noise. 

‘Hey.’ Yancy peers down over the side of his bunk. ‘You cold?’

‘No,’ Raleigh says stubbornly. He isn’t. He’s-- anxious, about something he can’t quite place. Has been for months now. At the back of his mind there is a notion he hasn’t yet found the words for, and it has to do with middles. Yancy is quiet. Jazmine is not. Yancy is old. Jazmine is a baby. Yancy is. Yancy is—

Where is Raleigh? Worlds apart from both of them.

‘You wanna come up here?’ 

‘No,’ Raleigh says. 

In the morning he wakes up warm, under a soft heaviness he knows right away is not an extra blanket, and his heart hurts.


	3. Know Not Whither

There's a story that allows for countless variations, and it’s still the same story every time: there’s a thief, and there’s a thief-taker, and so it goes. 

In this story, she doesn’t care what he’s stolen. She knows, of course, but circumstances are not important. She’s learned enough about him to guess what his next move will be, and enough about herself to be able to think three moves ahead. He’s young. The brief investigation she ordered in St. Petersburg revealed that he doesn’t have any friends – at least not the kind who would be willing to offer safe harbor knowing who is after him. Perhaps the enormity of what he’s done will catch up and he will start making costly mistakes. 

Still, he evades her, and days turn into weeks along highways and meandering train tracks. They chase until they run out of chase, and then some more, until it feels like they will run out of ground. 

The plain is a sea of grass carried back and forth in the wind. At the end, there is only the two of them and the gun she points at his back, calling: ‘Enough.’ At the end he turns to her, breathing hard, lets himself fall into the tall grass. Heavy as a toppled tower, arms outstretched in surrender. 

‘Are you going to kill me, Aleksandra Feodorovna?’ He winces when she presses her knee into his chest.

‘After all this, I’m thinking about it,’ she says earnestly. 

‘Why don’t you kiss me instead?’ He grins, open and self-assured and not particularly handsome.

It’s less kiss and more bite. His mouth is bloodied by the time she’s done, and the blood is on her lips too, like the red, red lipstick she applies with such precision every morning. She hasn’t worn it in days-turned-weeks. 

‘There,’ he says softly. ‘Now I can't go anywhere without you.’

They go, but not to St. Petersburg.


	4. Tortures

Here are three turning points in Herc Hansen’s childhood:

He is ten when Dad dies. Scotty is five. Neither of them really understands the nature of his long suffering, or why the rest of the family seems to regard it as a chore rather than a tragedy.

On the day of Dad’s funeral, Nana tells them a story. She’s 103 and senile, according to everyone on Mum’s extensive side of the family. Herc doesn’t know what that means. What he does know is that in the exhausting back-and-forth of dark suits and quietly spoken condolences, Nana is the only one who gives him and Scotty any attention. Once upon a time, she says, there was a young woman whose father lied to a king, boasting she could spin gold out of straw.

When Herc starts highschool, his grandparents – his other grandparents – offer to sponsor his studies, but only if he goes for a career in the military. Herc knows, with the clarity of a teenager who’s done a lot of growing up very quickly, that Mum has a hard time making ends meet. So he says yes. He doesn’t really think about the hows and whys. In theory, it’s supposed to build character. In practice, it lands him a tour in Afghanistan at age twenty-two. 

*

Here are two revelations of Herc Hansen’s married life:

Looming fatherhood will turn even the most reasonable of men superstitious.

Angie is a woman of endless patience, possessing the kind of intelligence that is in perfect balance with her husband’s quiet bullheadedness. When he asks if she’d like to wait before finding out the baby’s sex, she says OK. She observes him for weeks, though he only realizes it later, and when he asks tentatively what she thinks of Charlie for a name, she can’t help teasing: I thought you wanted to wait. He smiles, a little embarrassed, and kisses her. Charlie is good, she says. Charlotte is good too. 

*

Charles Hansen is born on August 14, with no complications and the expected number of fingers and toes. It’s just a story. He’s a strong and healthy baby who seems to do everything in the single-minded way of someone who has decided they are going to grow up to do interesting things at their own quick pace, whatever the universe’s feelings might be on the matter. 

It’s only a story.

*

The truth is, there is never a question of whom he is going to save. When he fights his way out of base at gun point; when he steals a helicopter, because he’s already done enough to have him court martialed ten times over, what’s a helicopter on top of all that; when he pilots it over Sydney-turned-wasteland, there is never a doubt in Herc’s mind as to where he’s going. 

He loves Angie too much to force them both to live in a world where she hates him. 

*

Stacker is a man whose entire life seems built on the foundations of logic and rational choice. He never makes a move that hasn’t been carefully calculated, and he is never unreasonable – except in one thing. The way we hurt our children, Herc thinks sometimes, is unfair in how difficult it becomes past a certain point to distinguish from good intentions.

They only talk about it openly after moving to Hong Kong. It’s not a contingency plan, it’s the only plan. Chuck carries inside him all the makings of an unstoppable force. Mako is, always has been, the fixed point to a fixed point. They need eachother and the world needs them.

In the end, it’s like this: Stacker has a ready-made drivesuit that he can get into in under five minutes. Herc was never supposed to break his arm. Mako was never supposed to climb into a jaeger. 

Stories are clever, self-serving beasts who have learned long ago that everything revolves around them eventually. 

*

Here is a fact which, however absurd, can be documented if anyone cares to do it: for about two hundred years, no first son in any generation of their family has died peacefully. 

Here is another fact, to which Herc Hansen sometimes clings for comfort: it ends with him.


End file.
